Rex Murphy: The difference between Western and Eastern protest

The difference between Western and Eastern protest

It’s almost a year ago now that the self-styled “feminist punk-collective” with the provocative name “Pussy Riot” staged one of their protest performances in the Moscow cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Mere weeks later, two of Pussy Riot’s performers were arrested. A third soon followed. All three were tried and sentenced to two years in prison camps. Various groups and individuals all around the world have protested the treatment of the protesters, particularly this gruelling and harsh sentence. One has reportedly been released. And there is a recent report that the European human rights commission is getting involved with the matter.

One thing the affair tells the world, it already knows: Vladimir Putin is running a regime, not a country. The movement from communism’s rigours and intolerance of dissent, to Putin’s stringent, arbitrary form of modified autocracy, has not been much of a movement at all. Russia is still, in part, the Russia of the communists and their ruthlessness when Putin wishes it to be, a place capable of immense human rights abuses, where the law is as often an ally of power as a check upon it.

It might be that Pussy Riot thought they could run a protest campaign much like their fellow protesters in the West. They may indeed have been influenced by the increasingly theatrical nature of Western protest — the puppets, masks and performances that are now the hallmark of street protests here — to believe that their stage-style protests in Russia would be received the same lenient way. This was a dangerous delusion.

Instead they learned, ever so harshly, that in Russia, a vulgar performance of political intent, carried out in an Orthodox cathedral, which would hardly have raised eyebrows in in any Western democracy these days, brought down hard anger and a demand for retribution from both church authorities and Putin himself.

Here in the West, protests, since the mid-’60s, are are a frequent, unremitting and characteristic part of the political process. Since that time protest has greatly mutated. The days of the Civil Rights movement saw a real and coherent cause, backed by a courageous protest movement, with real heroes — Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King. Thirty and 40 years on protest is a kind of political wallpaper.

We see the same groups, the same leaders who deny they are “leaders.” The causes are amorphous, or in some of the large movements simply too numerous to be coherent. Seven-year olds and grannies are in on the act. Protest is sometimes more play than politics, for some people who are regulars, just something to do as much as anything else — like going to a parade to watch the exhibits.

Our protesters — from the page at Parliament with the Stop Harper sign to the latest Greenpeacer performing some boring climbing stunt to hang a banner — know they act in both a time and a place that will demand little or no consequence for their actions, and might even earn them a kind of short-term fame. There are rewards for protest in the West, and media recognition is not the least of them.

In regimes where power is real and not shy about showing its cold face, speaking truth to it has equally real costs. In those jurisdictions, protests have real content. Courage purchases respect, fortitude underlines the moral and political seriousness of the event. Pussy Riot got a taste of that — 30 years earlier they’d have been dumped in the gulag for good. And the world would probably not have known it.

Protest and dissent on the Solzhenitsyn scale, or on the scale of that lone man who stood in front of the Tiananmen tanks in the mid ’80s, or those who today in various autocracies in the Middle East, face the fury of police violence, mob reprisal and even military force. They represent an altitude of political action and civic bravery as rare as it is to be respected.

These are not the “protest games” we have here in the West, where lightly-stocked minds tear down free-speech bulletin boards on a university campus and claim they are bravely stopping “hate speech.” Or, some performance artist makes a mock bomb, and leaves it at the ROM, as a “statement.” Nor is it some bunch hopping on subways in their underwear, or people wearing George Bush masks to save us all from “Fascism.”

Protests in the West like to borrow the robes of the genuine article, stir echoes from the Civil Rights epoch, or the giant dissenters of Russian communism, to speak somewhat in the same high tones. But here it’s more a game, a largely costless mime of the real thing. Over here, however, much they chant they are speaking “Truth to Power,” they are really just shouting opinions to passing cars, and putting slogans on Facebook and Twitter.

That’s the West’s style. Pussy Riot got caught in the middle: They had a Western-style protest, but were made to pay a Putin price.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.